Adam's Rib Research Articles

Feasting on Famine in Linda Hogan’s <i>Solar Storms</i>

In 1899 H. B. Cushman observed that when a Chickasaw died, tribal lamentations would last for several days and would con clude with a feast (410). Nearly one hundred years later in 1997, in the prologue to her novel Solar Storms, Chickasaw Linda Hogan recounts a feast.1 But in her presentation, Hogan changes several mourning-feast customs, the most salient of which requires that the mourned be deceased. The alteration of the tradi tional mourning feast serves not merely as a signpost for changing Native American rituals. Rather, the transformed mourning feast in Solar Storms indicts white culture for causing Native American famine, both physical and emotional. But in blurring some demar cations of culpability and in providing a role model in the form of the character offering the feast, Hogan points to ways in which the Native American community might respond to the emotional, bodily, and cultural starvation inflicted through postcolonialism.2 In this manner Hogan eschews what David L. Moore deems con struction of reductionist binaries concerning colonization.3 Hogan's Solar Storms recounts the story of Angela (Angel) Wing, a beleaguered seventeen-year-old whose disfigured face bears the scars of an unremembered trauma. Angela's deranged mother Hannah Wing necessitated Angela's placement in foster homes, from which Angela has fled for years. In a court record Angela dis covers the name of Agnes Iron, whom she contacts, believing her to be a relative. Agnes, Angela's great-grandmother, immediately sends money for Angela to join her in Adam's Rib, an economically

Revisiting Adam's Rib: Student Performance, Gender Stereotyping, and Trial Simulations

The manuscript explores gender stereotyping in performance evaluations in undergraduate mock trial competitions. The central hypothesis is that gendered expectations for attorney and witness behavior in the legal community inform and influence the evaluation of undergraduate performance in relation to communication methods, argumentation structure, fact presentation, and witness portrayals. Coaching techniques that seek to maximize competitiveness reinforce and perpetuate the stereotypes by training students to behave in ways that conform to gendered expectations. Using a comprehensive analysis of score sheets (judge evaluations) from tournaments, direct observation of competitions, interviews with coaches from multiple programs at all levels, and ballot comments, the manuscript assesses the significance of gender stereotyping in shaping evaluations provided by the attorneys who judge competitions. The manuscript also analyzes the relative success of male and female participants, using quantitative data on ballot scores, rankings, and individual awards.

Cukor and Collaboration: Subjective Displacement in America’s Postwar Years

Abstractions explain nothing, they themselves have to be explained: there are no such things as universals, there's nothing transcendent, no Unity, subject (or object), Reason; there are only processes, sometimes unifying, subjectifying, rationalizing, but just processes all same. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations The artist is man without content, who has no other identity than a perpetual emerging out of nothingness of expression and no other ground than this incomprehensible station on this side of himself. Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content Please recall that wonderful night on veranda / Amanda. Cole Porter, Farewell, Amanda (Music and Lyrics from Adam's Rib) IF THERE IS SOME SENSE OF A COLLABORATIVE AUTEUR in American director George Cukor's extensive filmography, pundits might agree that such collaboration arguably reached a kind of apogee when director teamed up with husband-and-wife screenwriting duo of Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon World War II. Starting in 1946, and for next seven years, such memorable films as A Double Life (1947), Adam's Rib (1949), Born Yesterday (1950), and Pat and Mike (1952), to name only high points, were stellar results of this extraordinary artistic alliance. In first part of this essay devoted to Cukor, I shall focus attention especially upon second of these titles because another element of collaboration becomes further foregrounded in Cukor's middle period: great acting duo of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Already well-known from their first appearance together in director George Stevens's hit film Woman of Year seven years earlier, Hepburn/Tracy duo would appear only to heighten Cukor's participant relationship with his that, according to Robert Emmet Long, a creative collaboration, just as it was with technical team he employed--designers and cameramen [and screenplay writers]--who were among best in their field and gave his movies their romantic gloss, warmth, and excitement (xii; further on 45, 56, 70). An entire directorial career spent working within the Hollywood system at beck and call of various autocratic movie moguls could have felt considerably oppressive to Cukor. And yet in a late interview granted to Peter Bogdanovich in 1983, Cukor admits: I've found I can function in this climate; technically, one is bedazzled here [because] [t]here is a spirit about malting pictures in Hollywood--everybody really involved--that I like so much. I may be sentimental about this ... but I think [that vitality] still exists to some extent (469-70, emphasis in original). Later, in second part of essay, I shall turn to Hepburn and Tracy's very first pairing together in aforementioned Stevens vehicle filmed during war years (1942). There, my purpose shall be to contrast rather more singular vision of Stevens's brand of Hollywood filmmaking when set beside Cukor's unique collaborative style to reveal just how controversial filmic collaboration might be in America's intrawar and postwar climate, for, according to Paul Cronin, Stevens vehement that director retain absolute control of his work and be able to affect every element of a film's production, Observes Cronin further: Always anxious to assert his rights as a director, something he did no matter whose feathers were ruffled in process, Stevens never hesitated to ensure he had everything needed to construct precisely film he wanted ... Stevens's friend, director Joseph Mankiewicz, explains that after actors were gone, technicians were gone, there was nothing left but George and his film ... And that's why malting of films, I thought, for George was a very private, personal thing, (xi, emphasis added) (1) Clearly, controversy surrounding collaboration makes a very clear separation between two quite disparate approaches to American filmmaking last century. …

Three‐Rib Circus: Women and Historical Discourse in Rebro Adama

W ith its snappy dialogue and melange of comedy, tragedy, and social satire, Viacheslav Krishtofovich's 1990 domestic drama, Adam 's Rib (Rebro Adama), remains one of the most popular perestroika-era films. Vladimir Kunin's award-winning screenplay is based loosely on Anatolii Kurchatkin's 1989 House of Women (Babii dom), a novella about a family of women-a divorced mother, her two daughters from very different husbands, and a paralyzed grandmother.' In the screenplay and contemporaneous kinopovest',2 Kunin sharpens the conflicts of Kurchatkin's slice-of-life drama, both driving its issues to the wall, to extreme definitions, and infusing the narrative with additional layers of meaning-the imbrications of gender issues in contemporary Russia and a broader historical commentary that Krishtofovich explores in the film.

Hegel and Adam's Rib

Hegel and Adam's Rib

Another Blow to Adam's Rib Psychologies of Women

Another Blow to Adam's Rib Psychologies of Women

Adam's rib awry? Women and schistosomiasis

The present paper reviews the literature to determine whether there are predisposing factors which influence the transmission, prevalence, intensity of infection and morbidity of schistosomiasis in women. The review suggests that: (1) the higher prevalence rates observed in males, in most endemic areas, are not due to sex per se, but to the greater opportunities afforded to males for exposure; (2) cultural and social practices often determine occupational roles and, in some circumstances, these practices may protect women from exposure; (3) when women assume typical ‘male’ roles, their tisk and prevalence of infection increases; (4) in Muslim societies, women's exposure to water is restricted and infection rates are usually lower; (5) morbidity does not appear to be influenced by sex; and (6) the most important impact of schistosomiasis on women is its possible disruption of maternal functions, such as pregnancy, and its role in maternal, infant and child mortality and fetal wastage. Suggestions are also made for expanding existing research and for new studies concerning factors which may influence infection and disease in women.

Rui Goncalves: An Early Portuguese Jurist and the Status of Women

Rui Goncalves: An Early Portuguese Jurist and the Status of Women

Adam's Rib and the Equality of the Sexes: Some Medieval Exegesis of Gen 2:21-22

L'A. examine la tradition de l'interpretation de deux versets de la Genese (Genese 2:21-22), a propos de la creation de la femme. Dans ce passage, on raconte que la femme a ete creee au cote de l'homme ce qui signifierait egalite plutot que domination ou soumission. En second lieu, l'A. s'interesse au commentaire de Thomas d'Aquin qui s'inscrit dans la tradition de l'exegese medievale qui n'a, selon lui, pas recu l'attention des chercheurs. Cette interpretation originale n'a pas change depuis Augustin

Screwball Comedies: Constructing Romance, Mystifying Marriage

As floating signifiers go, romance has gotten around more than usual. The term has long designated several different generic categories of prose fiction, as well as a particular kind of subject matter with which fiction, romance or novel, may deal. There are film genres, such as romantic comedy, that derive their identity from their concern with love and courtship. But in film studies, the term has additionally named both a self-conscious component of a Hollywood product, its love-interest, and also a frequent element of the ideological effect known as narrative displacement. Romance is very often the receptacle of displacement, which is fitting for a term that also has come to be almost a synonym for illusion. But to treat romance as merely illusion or false-consciousness will lead one to ignore the particular characteristics of its construction and effect. What most analyses of both literature and film have failed to acknowledge is that romance has itself been treated as an ideology by feminist writers such as Shulamith Firestone and Juliet Mitchell. While this ideology is pervasive in Hollywood films, it is perhaps most central to the screwball comedy.1 The most sustained analysis of screwball comedy to date is Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness. Despite the fact that the focus of Cavell's argument is marriage, he neglects the feminist perspective almost entirely and the significant body of feminist film study completely. This is certainly a major reason for his failure to understand the cultural work of the genre. Where Cavell goes wrongand it is hardly a peripheral place-is his position that the screwball comedies he discusses succeed in enlightening us about marriage itself. My argument is that they do just the opposite: they mystify marriage by portraying it as the goal-but not the end-of romance. The major cultural work of these films is not the stimulation of thought about marriage, but the affirmation of marriage in the face of the threat of a growing divorce rate and liberalized divorce laws. What an analysis of screwball comedies will show is that romance functions as a specific ideology that is used by these films to mystify marriage. I hope to show how screwball comedies typically construct the viewer as subject of their romance so that he or she must feel marriage as the thing desired. I will then consider how certain elements in the genre suggest a critique of marriage, and examine how these elements can become dominant in such films as Adam's Rib and Desperately Seeking Susan.

Getting To Know You

Roger A. Shiner GETTING TO KNOW YOU IN pursuits OF happiness, Stanley Cavell attempts to establish the existence of a previously unrecognized genre of film — "comedies of remarriage " — which both includes and is defined by such movies as Adam's Rib, Bringing Up Baby, and TL· Philadelphia Story. l By "marriage" and "remarriage " is meant a certain kind of enduring emotional intimacy with which we as adult men and women will be involved, an intimacy which is an integral part of the human form of life and whose relationship to an institutionally supported legal status in our culture is not one of identity. The same is true for the concept of "divorce" in this context. Using some of Cavell's interpretive ideas as a starting point, I shall seek to present the genre of remarriage as a figure for the profoundest relationships of epistemology and metaphysics — the relationship of the knower to the world which is known and the relationship of the individual to die other individuals widi whom society is shared. Specifically, divorce and remarriage as part of human life are to be seen as figures for separation and kinship, avoidance and acknowledgement in the philosophical sense of those terms.2 My discussion proceeds on several levels. There is film criticism, which attempts to find significance in certain movies. There is an examination of values, which presents a certain view ofmarriage as a human relationship. There is some metaphysics, which addresses certain traditional philosophical problems in a nontraditional way. And finally there is metaphilosophy , which attempts to present a different way ofhow to ask, and how to acknowledge as being answered, the great questions of philosophy. Only the latter two projects could be described as "philosophical" in a conventional sense. Yet, as Arthur Danto has rightly remarked,3 Cavell in Pursuits ofHappiness seems to be trying to suggest that to blur deliberately the distinction between criticism and philosophy is to show something 80 Roger A. Shiner81 important about philosophy (and thus criticism as well). If this essay in some small way is thought to show something similar, I shall be pleased. Cavell begins his chapter on It Happened One Night with some ruminations on Locke, Hume, Kant, and the idea of the limitations of human reason. Kant undertakes to show, Cavell claims (PH, pp. 75-76), that our position as human knowers is both better and worse than the Empiricists suggest. It is worse, because even if we pressed human knowledge to its Kantian limits, we would know more but not enough to fulfill the philosopher 's dream. It is better, because the very facts that are limitations of human knowledge are also the necessary conditions ofknowledge as such and to know those conditions clearly is enormously to increase human knowledge. The link between the limitations ofhuman knowledge and the comedies of remarriage is forged by the thought (CR, p. 74) that the capacity to relate oneself to the world by knowledge and the capacity to relate oneselfto others by marriage are both constitutive ofhuman society. Human community is based in part on the fact that there are limitations as to what each of us as individual knowers can know. We need each other's knowledge. If one of us were per impossibile to transcend the limitations of human knowledge, he would know, as it were, what God knows and thus have the power that God has. But the existence of these limitations reveals something deep about human knowledge, something which traditional theory of knowledge rejects, namely that it is human. Human knowledge is limited, but it is genuine. It rests on no surer a foundation than human community, but human beings are a community. We need each other, but we are there for each other. Community, and therefore knowledge, does not need to be achieved: it exists.4 Similarly, the conventions in society limiting the capacity to relate oneselfto others by marriage (one at a time, and only under protest not one forever) reveal something deep about the nature of marriage. The mutuality of the intimacy ofmarriage is possible only in conjunction with the exclusiveness of marriage. Only by turning away from all others can the taking into...

The articulations of Adam's rib with the lower urinary tract

Patient 1. A 23-year-old, mentally retarded woman was admitted to the hospital for evaluation of a pelvic mass. Noted to have ambiguous genitalia at birth, the patient was raised as a boy until age 4. At that time, she was hospitalized because of difficulty in urinating. The phallus was intermediate in size; also present were a common urethral-vaginal opening, nearly fused labioscrotal folds, and an inguinal hernia. Laparotomy disclosed a normal-appearing gonad on the left (thought to be an ovary), no gonad on the right, and no uterus, but a white, string-like, apparently solid structure that connected the broad ligaments and was closely applied to a large, hypotonic bladder. The patient had a clitorectomy and enlargement of the urethral orifice and was thereafter raised as a girl. At age 12, she developed marked hirsutism and acne. At age 20, chronic pyelonephritis was diagnosed, and an intravenous pyelogram showed a double collecting system bilaterally, with left hydronephrosis and hydroureters. At that time a firm, movable, midline pelvic mass was noted during two physical examinations, but not on a third, nor was the mass visible on the IVP. The patient was a short, hirsute woman with low-set ears, a low hairline, a broad chest with no breast development, and marked cubitus valgus. Vital signs were normal. There were a male degree and distribution of body hair, some temporal recession, and some mustache hair. A complete blood count and other routine laboratory evaluations were normal, including a serum creatinine level of 0.8 mg/dl and a creatinine clearance of 130 liter/24 hr. Adrenal steroids were normal at

Pursuits of Happiness: A Reading of The Lady Eve

T _HIS ACCOUNT of my experience of Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve is shaped around two claims. The first claim is that this film is one of six or seven main films constituting a genre of Hollywood talkies of thirties and forties. I shall call genre the comedy of remarriage. Its other main instances are It Happened One Night, His Girl Friday, The Awful Truth, The Philadelphia Story, and Adam's Rib; and I will also, for reasons given elsewhere,1 feel free to include Bringing Up Baby. I am for myself satisfied that this group of films constitutes principal group of Hollywood comedies after advent of sound and therewith one definitive achievement in

Adam's Rib: Bone of Contention

“Now that the Genesis creation story is generally interpreted in religious rather than in historical terms, Adam's rib is popularly afforded little more than facetious comments. In what follows, such ribbing will be discounted in an attempt to look at significant treatments of the rib motif in the Judeo-Christian tradition. We can designate the various kinds of commentary under the heads of ‘androcentric,’ gynocentric, and‘egalitarian’ interpretations.”

Thoughts about medical writing. XXVII. Adam's rib and the anatomy of medical prose.

Thoughts about medical writing. XXVII. Adam's rib and the anatomy of medical prose.

Adam's Rib: Essays on Biblical Medicine.

This is a fascinating book on the Bible, written by a physician who has studied the text very carefully, apparently in Hebrew. The Bible is particularly interesting when it is interpreted by a learned physician. For example, Levin says that some of King David's symptoms suggest syphilis. If Psalm 38 is his (and it is headed A Psalm of David), then he gives a reasonable description of shooting pains, gummatous wounds, and iritis, all supposedly as a consequence of sexual indiscretions with his neighbor's wife, Bathsheba. The Psalmist says, is no soundness in my flesh... neither is there any rest in my bones because of my sin. My wounds stink and are corrupt because of my foolishness... my loins are filled with a burning (Jewish Publication Society of America translation).... My heart panteth... as for the light of mine eyes, it is also gone from

Adam's Rib

Anne F. Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics 1830-1930, University of Chicago Press. 1970. $5.95. 247 pp. Emily Jane Putnam, The Lady: Studies of Certain Significant Phases of Her History, University of Chicago Press. 1969; first published 1910. $5.95.323 pp. Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement, University of Washington Press. 1969; first published 1923. $10.50. 504 pp. Far more than the history of the old world, the history of the new has been overwhelmingly masculine. If the black schoolboy discovers from his texts that History is something made by whites, then the American schoolgirl (and how much more the Canadian girl!) finds that it is some- thing made by men. No Queens, no Empresses, no courtesans, no concu- bines, no militant saints; no Catherine, no Elizabeth, no Tz'u Hsi, no Madame de Pompadour, no Madame de Stael, no Rani of Jhansi, no Joan of Arc. Even the occasional Presidential mistresses appear to have been domestic little women, quite lacking in political ambition, and Canadian politicians seem to have been more susceptible to drink than to women. One of the more interesting aspects of the present Black revolution is the the attempt to rescue the historical Black man from invisibility and now some historians are trying to do the same thing for the American woman. The title of a recent collection of historical documents on women is sig- nificant: The American Woman: Who Was She?

Malayasia as a Nation-State

An implicit assumption underlay the termination of colonial rule in Southeast Asia that the peoples who were thereby given their independence could reasonably indeed with certainty -be expected to stand on their own feet, the colonial interlude having been no more than a temporary disturbance of their historical condition and natural development as nation-states. It has yet to be demonstrated that that expectation was wrong. It has also yet to be demonstrated that it was right. India set the pace in the process of decolonization, and the unquestionable lightness of the expectation in her case -both a priori and in the event -was the foundation for a doctrine quickly extended to Southeast Asia. It was not unfitting that India should become the exemplar for Further India: she had been the source of most of its political ideas in the remote past; French Indochina had been constituted in many details on the model of British India, while Malaya had begun its colonial life as a dependency rather of India than of Britain; and Mr. Nehru was now adopting the posture both of patron and of advocate to speed the process of Southeast Asian emancipation ably and enthusiastically seconded, of course, by Mr. Malcolm Macdonald, the senior Briton and most prestigious European in the region, from his borrowed Mount Meru in Johore. Indeed, in the world political climate of the time, there was really no option for anybody over decolonization: the example of India could be followed, but it could not not be followed. There was no question that the metropolitan powers would relinquish their dominion only to whom, when, and under what constitutional arrangements. The question whether the Southeast Asian peoples could stand on their own feet did not arise as such -only how the successor states could best maintain internal unity, how they could be made economically and administratively viable, and how their independence, once they had it, was to be defended. On this practical level, the example of India was not much help, for, in giving up her Adam's rib for the creation of Pakistan, she had compromised her own internal unity from the outset, however reluctantly, while her very size as second biggest nation in the world, even when cut down by the loss of Pakistan, begged all the Southeast Asian questions of economics, administration, and defence. That the independence which would follow the termination of colonial rule would necessarily find its constitutional shape in nationstates had not been quite so clear in prospect before the event as it now appears to us in retrospect after the event: independence and nationalism did not become synonyms in common usage till after World War II. As late as 1941, Mr. Nehru was able to envisage an independent